


Cards from the Revolution

by Philosophizes



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: (Really which one of these is the one people use?), Cards AU, Cardtalia, Cardverse, Exile, Gen, Politics, Rebellion, Revolution, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 10:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4873636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosophizes/pseuds/Philosophizes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Four Kingdoms have come out of balance- one Kingdom is missing entirely, and the others don't have their governments in proper order, King Queen Knight and Diviner, as things were meant to be.</p>
<p>And the world is just one revolution after another. The question is, what good will it do?</p>
<p>Listen to the cards when they speak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cards from the Revolution

**_The High Priestess_ **

Ivan’s younger sister, the Diviner of Clubs, came to his room late that third evening after the Queen of Clubs had been assassinated by an agent of Diamonds.

“Ivan,” she whispered, her loose from its green ribbons and sheer headscarf for the first time since she’d been twelve, years ago. “The King is going to have me killed.”

“He can’t,” Ivan said, throat dry. “He _can’t_ , Natalya, you’re _Diviner._ That would- it would _destroy_ us!”

“We’re already destroying ourselves,” Natalya said. “You know that.”

It was true, however much the King had forbidden saying so on pain on death. Fifty years of expansionist war against Hearts and Diamonds, even if Hearts had negotiated peace twenty years in, had been a breeding ground, these last eight years- ever since the day Natalya became Diviner in place of their mother- of revolutionaries and dissent.

“Did… did he not like his new Queen?” Ivan asked, trying to figure out _why_ the King he was named for would possibly consider killing the woman who embodied the very foundation of the kingdom.

Natalya chuckled.

“Oh, he won’t, when I tell him,” she said. “It’s to be Erzsébet Héderváry. And her husband will be the Knight.”

“But he should be happy,” Ivan said. “He’s always wanted a Knight to lead the army, like they did in old days, so he could finish his war-”

_‘Finish’_ would mean the total destruction of all the other kingdoms, but- anything to _end_ this.

“-and I’ve never heard of this- Eyrzavet? She sounds like she’s from one of the New Territories, but that’s not a bad thing for a Queen, to know the people she’s supposed to rule in justice-”

“Ivan,” Natalya said. “Erzsébet Héderváry is the Scourge.”

“No,” Ivan whispered. “Tasha-”

“And her husband is Roderich Edelstein,” his sister continued. “The man behind the pamphlets, and the papers-”

“The author and editor of the _Sedition Times_ is supposed to be the Knight of Clubs?” he said, aghast. “He’s the most anti-war and anti-expansionist person on the entire political stage! And the Scourge, the leader of the rebellion, who would lead the Home Guard and the run the courts and the police- _Queen?_ ”

“It’s what the cards said, Ivan,” Natalya told him, voice firm. “They’re what Clubs needs. We need to stop the war, and we need a strong had to put the empire in order.”

“He _will_ kill you if you tell him, Tasha. Don’t tell him- please, don’t tell him. Say the new Queen hasn’t been born yet, she’s too young-”

“I _can’t_ lie about the cards, Ivan.”

“So run away,” Ivan begged. “Run away and get the Queen and the Knight and come back-”

“I can’t run,” Natalya said. “I can’t lie, and I can’t leave.”

She reached into the front of her bodice, to the pocket in the Diviner’s dress where the deck pocket was, and pulled it out. She flipped the top three cards out onto the table.

“Every time,” she said quietly. “I get the same thing. High Priestess- higher powers, the divine. The Wheel of Fortune- the cycle of life, the turning points of history. Ace of Clubs.”

She didn’t have to explain the last one- the aces in a Diviner’s deck were always meant to stand for the kingdom as a whole.

“I have to die for this to work, Ivan,” Natalya said. “I have to go to Public Court tomorrow and announce in front of the entire nobility, city and landed, and the civic leaders and the representatives of the lower class, while they’re all gathered for mourning the Queen, and tell the King who the Queen and Knight are to be. It’s the only way to be sure _everyone_ knows, the only way to make it public knowledge. The only way the King can’t deny it and keep the country from following their ordained leaders.”

“But he _won’t_ be King with them,” Ivan protested. “And- Natalya, you haven’t said anything about who’s supposed to replace _you-_ ”

“I don’t know who, brother,” she cut him off. “But I _have_ to do this.”

She gathered the cards back up, and then pulled out one of her green ribbons and the sheer headscarf from a pocket, and bundled it up it them.

“No,” Ivan said, when she tried to hand them over. “Natalya, _I’m_ no Diviner.”

“No, you’re not,” Natalya agreed. “But someone has to take care of them. _You_ know what happened the last time a Diviner opposed Rulers who disagreed with them.”

Ivan knew his history, and took them reluctantly. In the past, Diamonds and Clubs’ Diviners had had a deck like Hearts, with the old suites- Medallions, Staves, Cups, and Swords. But the Diviners had opposed Kings or Queens who weren’t possessed of the good sense they should have, and everything but the Arcana, the non-numbered cards, had been burned.

The Arcana had always mysteriously survived. Somewhere out there, if Spades- or Swords, in the old way- even existed, there might even been a fourth set of Arcana cards, waiting to be taken up and have Kingdom cards made for them.

“ _You_ are the one who has to leave,” Natalya continued. “The Queen is on the frontier, and the Knight is safe in one of the large cities of Diamonds, somewhere near the border but not close enough to be in danger yet. The Queen will know which. You have to find her, and get her to come and take their places.”

“They won’t believe me,” Ivan said. “I’ll just be some High Clubs nobility. The enemy, with dangerous delusions.”

“No,” his sister told him, fishing under the neckline of her dress and pulling out the heavy emerald-and-gold chain of office that was never supposed to leave the King’s presence. “You’ll be the rightful King of Clubs.” 

* * *

 

**_The World_ **

“We have to go to the colonies,” Timo said after they’d all crammed in around their rickety kitchen table for breakfast. It was late winter, which meant it was rainy and miserable here in the seaside capital of Diamonds, and the warmth of being packed together was welcome in the drafty top-floor apartment they all shared.

Matthias looked at him askance.

“The war’s _over,_ ” he said. “Clubs has got a new Ruling Family-”

Timo glared at him and slapped a card down on the table. The room went silent.

He lifted his hand to reveal The World, then reached across the table and the food to spread the rest of the deck out in a line, face down, in front of Søren.

“Pick four,” the Diviner of Spades ordered his King.

Søren’s hands hovered over the cards for a few long moments, and then he slowly picked four cards and handed them over. Timo flipped them over as he placed them, one on each side of The World.

They all came up Aces- Swords at the top, Medallions to the right, Staves at the bottom, and Cups to the left.

“Spades, Diamonds, Clubs, and Hearts,” Timo said. “It’s time for all _four_ kingdoms to come to order.”

“And we can do that _here,_ ” Matthias argued. “Diamonds is sitting on the majority of what _was_ Spades’ land, back in the day.”

“Today is not the past!” Timo snapped. “Diamonds is _not_ the place for Spades to rise again, Knight!”

Berwald held a hand out over the table to calm the impending argument.

“Where?” the Queen asked the Diviner.

“The colonies,” Timo insisted. “Like I _said._ It’s time for Spades to come again, but we’re not to do it by taking land we held before even the Hearts’ Empire had started to expand. Its Diamonds land now, or Hearts or even Clubs, and we can’t change that. We need new ground to grow a new kingdom in.”

“But the _colonies?_ ” Søren asked. “There are barely any Spades people-”

“ _I’m_ not Spades!” Timo cut him off, exasperated. “Unless you _forgot_ who my people are? My cousin is _Erzsébet Héderváry;_ before Clubs came my people weren’t a part of any of this! We were hill-people, mountain-people! Nomads! But now we’ve been pulled into this, and I’m here to tell you that the Spades-that-is-to-be is _not_ the Spades-that-was!”

He tapped The World with a finger.

“I know that the positions have passed down in your family for centuries, since the last Ruling Family of Spades went into hiding together,” he said. “But-”

He leaned over the table again and snagged a card from the ones still lying in front of Søren, and showed it off.

Death.

“-it’s not about _you_ any longer,” Timo said. “It’s time for you to move on. You are the last Ruling Family that will be from the Old Spades- from Swords.”

His Rulers looked at each other uneasily, and Timo sighed. He loved them, and he didn’t like to hurt them; but he was Diviner. He told the truth the cards imparted, no matter what it meant for him or anyone else.

“I know you wanted to bring Spades back,” he told them. “I know it’s what you’ve lived for. But you aren’t the ones to do it. That’s for the next Family- and they’ll be from the colonies. We _have_ to go.”

There was silence around the table.

“It’ll be better this way,” Timo said, trying to convince them. “Sure, Clubs has a new Ruling Family- but Natalya died for it, and they haven’t replaced her with a new Diviner. They’re working in the dark. And here in Diamonds- Basch got his position from his father, but he’s not _meant_ to be Diviner. He’s rubbish at it. He should have been Knight, but you know how Diamonds is about that position. There hasn’t been a Knight in _centuries_ in any of landed kingdoms, and since that’s what Clubs wanted for the war, Diamonds _can’t_ have one. He’s wrong-placed, and Clubs doesn’t have a Diviner at all, and in Hearts-”

“There’s nothing wrong in Hearts, though,” Matthias said.

“That’s what _you_ think,” Timo told him, thinking about the cards he’d been getting lately. “But Basch became Diviner because the rest of the Rulers refused to let him be Knight. Hearts has been passed down through family lines, mostly- and King Marcus only has one child. Their Diviner is dying, and the Queen is always sick. Renata’s going to have make a choice, and whatever she picks, Hearts will be missing something. You wait ten or twenty years- they’ll have plenty of problems.”

After a moment, Søren sighed.

“Very well,” the King of Spades said. “You are Diviner, and you have spoken. We’re going to the colonies.” 

* * *

 

**_The Hanged Man_ **

Feliciano was curled up in the little hidden room in the Diviner’s suite in the Palace of Hearts, clutching his sedated baby brother and trying to cry without making any noise.

He could hear the revolutionaries dragging his mother away, just like she’d told him they were going to. Her deck of cards was burning a hole in his pocket. The chest that held the King’s Medallion, the Knight’s Sword, and the Cup of the Diviners was taking up almost the entire rest of the room, the Queen’s Staff lying on top of it.

His eldest sister had been Knight of Hearts, the first one in centuries, until two weeks ago, when she’d been shot and killed as she led the revolutionaries in storming the palace.

Grandfather had been King until eight days ago, when the revolutionaries had executed them in the plaza outside the palace. His mother hadn’t let him see, and closed the heavy curtains of the windows overlooking the area.

“One last lesson, little Feli,” she’d told him, laying out cards as the roar of the crowd outside swelled. The King was dead.

On the delicate table dedicated to readings, as little Cristino slept on his pillows in other room, Feliciano’s mother had laid out two rows of four cards. The first row, the top one, were the Rulers of the Hearts suit- Cups, in this old, old deck. Under each, she placed a selected Arcana card.

“The King,” she told him. “Is the public face of the kingdom and the Rulers. The King handles diplomacy, and writes our laws and keeps our history. They do the state functions, and give the speeches, and appoint diplomats and lead our public celebrations and ceremonies. It is the King’s job to take what the Diviner says and make sure it is implemented, and to balance the efforts and decisions of the Queen and the Knight. They are the final word, unless the Diviner overrides.”

She touched the Temperance card beneath the King.

“A good King has purpose. They find meaning and connections, and strive for patience and balance. They are moderate when they must be, and drastic when it is called for.”

The card next to Temperance was Judgement.

“This is not only judgement. This is the remaking of self from introspection, the knowledge of your inner calling, clear self-evaluation, and absolution, forgiveness, and mercy. The Queen is in charge of the Home Guard, the police, and the courts. They ensure the enforcement of the laws the King makes, but also reevaluates them if needed, and holds the power to declared guilt or innocence. They assign the punishments for transgressions- including nothing, granting mercy. That is the mark of a good Queen.”

His mother paused to stare at the next pair of cards, and Feliciano hugged her. Santiana’s funeral had only been a few days ago, and the revolutionaries hadn’t allowed them to go to it, since they were under house arrest. She’d been allowed out, under accompaniment, to retrieve the Knight’s sword, because she was Diviner. The symbols of authority of the Rulers of Hearts were under her ultimate care.

“The Knight,” she said eventually. “Is a commonly-misunderstood position, because it has been so long since any kingdom has had one consistently, as they do with the other positions. They are best-known in the stories for leading the armies and other military forces of the kingdom, and for being the ones to declare war. But they are primarily meant to the peacekeeper for the kingdom. They monitor and moderate political and social debate, and serve as the other Rulers’ spokesperson in matters internal to the kingdom to national civic, religious, and political leaders. They attack only in defense.”

The card beneath the Knight was The Lovers- unity, harmony, alignment, the making of love and of choices.

“Vespasiana didn’t understand that,” Feliciano heard his mother murmur, and her eyes slid over to the last pair of cards- Page of Cups in this deck, Jack of Hearts in the regular game decks of cards that were common across all the kingdoms, and the High Priestess.

“The Diviner reads the cards,” she told him simply. “We are the ones who can read the universe, to tell what is wrong and what is needed. We give advice. We tell the truth. We are indispensable. Long before there were Knights or Queens or Kings, Feliciano, there were only Diviners. People do not understand how necessary we are. Diviners are the only ones who can take other positions. When my grandmother, who was Diviner before me, called me to her as she was dying, she told me that I could be Diviner or Knight, but Diviner was more important. The Diviner is the foundation of the kingdom. She said I would be Diviner and then _also_ Knight, because Hearts was in need of one again- but then _your_ Grandmother, the Queen, died soon after, and so I took her place. I had three children, soon to be four-”

She smiled fondly down at him.

“-and I thought to myself: _‘I will have four children, enough for each position. I have had so many children and taken so many lovers, listened to people slander me as the Royal Whore, because my parents only had one child, and I cannot hold so much of Ruler’s power myself. One of them will be Knight.’_ And so we find ourselves here, Feliciano, with revolutionaries, because I chose to be Queen instead of Knight, as was needed; made Santiana Knight instead of Queen, as she should have been. She took her Queen’s sense of judgement to the sword and got herself killed. We are not infallible, Feliciano; even as we are almost never wrong. The last Diviner of Diamonds made a mistake, passing her position to her son Basch. He is meant to be Knight, and doesn’t have the insight for his formal position. They are as out-of-balance as badly as we are; or as Clubs still is, now that they are without their Diviner, though their new King does not try to pervert the position of Knight and take it for himself as those before him did.”

Just over a week later, and the revolutionaries that Santiana had helped lead were going to kill her. The last thing she’d told him was that the revolutionaries thought that getting rid of the Rulers system would start to solve their problems, since it had been broken for so long before, but that it wouldn’t.

_“Soon enough they will need us again,”_ she’d said. _“Wait for it, Feliciano, and then come back. They need you, and you need them. Do not hold this against them.”_

The sounds of the revolutionaries faded, and Feliciano sat in the cramped dark, trying to figure out how he was supposed to get out of the Palace with Cristino _and_ the Ruler’s effects without getting caught or killed, and how he was supposed to survive at just barely fourteen on his own-

He nearly screamed when the door to the hidden room popped open, the light from beyond obscured by people standing in front of it.

“Feli!” one of them hissed, and he recognized his older brother, dressed as a revolutionary.

Lovino wasn’t supposed to be here, he was on a ship he was a merchant he traded between the Diamond colonies and this coast, Diamonds had branded he and his husband a privateer and sea-bandit, conducting business in unauthorized ports-

“Put these on!” Lovino ordered, shoving some clothes at him. He picked up Cristino and put him in a large pouch-bag slung across his front.

Feliciano wanted to protest that, Cristino was sedated so he wouldn’t make noises, and with the flap closed like that he might not start to fuss if he couldn’t get enough air; but he wasn’t really moving in tandem with himself, nothing was quite there.

He watched Antonio roll the Queen’s Staff up in one of the carpets and rest it against one of his shoulders. With his free hand, he picked up one of the ends of the chest Feliciano had been hiding with. Lovino picked up the other end, and grabbed one of Feliciano’s hands.

“They’re looting the palace,” his brother told him urgently. “Anyone who tries to stop us, I’m a tailor and you’ve been an errand boy for the Rulers. I came with my friend to make sure you were okay and we’re taking what we’re owed for your work. Let _me_ do the talking.”

No one stopped them, on their way out, though some revolutionaries grinned at them as they went by, approving of their assumed new riches.

The last thing Feliciano saw of the Palace he’d lived his entire life in was his mother’s hanged body dangling from the ceremonial balcony where the King always reviewed parades.

He didn’t register the city as they fled through it. The next he was really conscious, Lovino was pressing a waking Cristino into his arms, and they were on Lovino’s ship, leaving the harbor of the capital of Hearts for the Diamond colonies. 

* * *

 

**_The Lovers_ **

Ivan had been King of Clubs for five years when the first emissary from the post-revolution government in Hearts arrived at his court.

She was a pretty young woman, light-haired and light-eyed in the way that the mid-continent people were, the ones people sometimes claimed had been Spades once, before the old Hearts Empire had obliterated it so thoroughly that it had turned into the myth everyone else thought they were; and the only daughter in the slew of children of Theudericks Beilschmidt, the new Governor of Hearts.

Ivan always had to suppress a snort at the man’s name. It was just so- he knew that the Governor was an ethnic nationalist and that part of the reason he’d been at the front of the revolution was because he’d been angling to break his people’s second-class status in Hearts, the way they were ignored or derided in Diamonds- and yes, in Clubs too, as citizens of the New Territories- but there should be a rule against assuming a new, ultra-ethnic name as a political prop.

Theudericks Beilschmidt had imposed it on his children, too, and so this daughter of his was named Adalheidis.

She seemed to be a perfectly pleasant and friendly woman, the times that Ivan had interacted with her as King, but he was too busy with the country to get to know any of the diplomats on a more personal basis.

Erzsébet was the first one to talk to him about it, which concerned him slightly. His Queen was even more busy with Clubs’ internal affairs than _he_ was. Was she even _sleeping?_

“So Adalheidis Beilschmidt,” she said one day over lunch.

“Is she causing trouble?” had been Ivan’s first thought.

Roderich had snorted. Ivan had learned that he could be as scathing in person as he had been in print.

“ _In_ trouble, maybe,” he muttered.

“She and Gilbert are in love,” Erzsébet told Ivan.

He… sort of recognized the name.

“Who?” he asked.

“He’s on Roderich’s staff,” Erzsébet said. “The combative one.”

_“Oh,”_ Ivan said, with a little wince of memory. “The secretary who keeps challenging Duma lords to honor duels?”

“He always wins.”

“But he _shouldn’t_ be,” Roderich sniffed. “He’s supposed to be doing _diplomacy._ ”

“I like him,” his wife said. “He’s fun to argue with. And he _does_ do diplomacy, Roderich, he just treats having an argument like having a fistfight. Especially if the other party insulted him, and the Duma lords are _always_ insulting him. They won’t do it to his face any longer, but the Lords’ staffers and servants talk. But when he’s not talking to the Duma Lords, you can’t deny he gets good results.”

“Gilbert _who?_ ” Ivan asked. With a funny name like that, he was definitely New Territories stock, but he couldn’t place the ethnicity.

“Gilbert nobody,” Erzsébet told him. “He’s mid-continent mongrel bastard orphan. He says his mother was of the same people the Beilschmidts are, but he’s out of the low hill country. There’s plenty people can use to insult him, and when they can do that to you, you either learn to hate everything and everyone, or you learn how to love fighting.”

That last bit was more for her husband than for Ivan.

“And what could city bourgeoisie like Adalheidis Beilschmidt see in our Knight’s most troublesome staff secretary?” he asked.   

“They’re in love,” Roderich said. “Do they _need_ a reason?”

“Well,” Ivan said. “Keep an eye on it, please.”

It was times like this- and the day a year and a half later, when his Knight grumpily showed Gilbert, worked up to combativeness to cover his nervousness, into his presence to ask for permission to marry his foreign sweetheart- that Ivan dearly wished for a Diviner. 

* * *

 

**_The Hermit_ **

His brother-in-law’s ship was faster than the government’s couriers, so Yao didn’t get any warning. Lovino just turned up on his doorstep with his husband and his little brothers and the royal effects of Hearts.

Yao had just looked at them, sighed, let them in, and sent Yong-Soo out to the plazas to retrieve his wife from her daily declamations in the forum.

Vespasiana came running back, even outpacing Yong-Soo, just as Kim Phuong and Kiku were getting the hospitality tea out on the table. Yao’s long-term guest and friend, Surinder, was talking up Antonio about current trade and political repercussions while Lovino sat slumped over the low floor table and Feliciano fussed with his shirt, since Antonio had taken Cristino.

The very first thing Vespasiana did, before anyone could begin to talk, was throw her arms around her twin brother. Lovino clung to her, and the whole story spilled out.

Other people might have shooed the children out of the room- Surinder was raising an eyebrow at him- but Yao knew the sort of situations that had made all of his adopted younger siblings orphans, same as him. They knew that the world wasn’t a pleasant place, and how important the Four Kingdoms’ politics was to knowing when danger was coming.

Lovino’s story ended, and then there was silence for a few moment, until-

“ _Mama_ gave me her _cards!_ ” Feliciano wailed suddenly, and broke down crying.

Vespasiana tried to shush him, but Lovino waved her off tiredly.

“It’s the most he’s said the entire time it’s taken us to get here,” he said. “Leave him be, sister.”

Family by marriage was still family, and Yao _knew_ traumatized children. Antonio had left the chest with the Hearts’ effects off by the wall, and he stood and picked it up.

He heard Feliciano scramble up and follow him, tearfully protesting against his siblings’ attempts to get him to sit down and calm down, telling them _he_ was Diviner of Hearts and he _had_ to look after the effects-

Yao took the chest into his home’s shrine room, with the spirit-house on the altar with the scrolls that held the specialized prayers for honoring ancestors neither he nor any of his siblings had had families to know of. There was another chest in here, placed away from the wall, and Yao put Feliciano’s back-to-back with it.

He motioned for Feliciano to sit down in front of it. The boy sank down hesitantly, the too-big staff he was refusing to let go of knocking awkwardly against the floor.

Yao went to close the door, and sat in front of his own chest, facing him.

“So you are Diviner for Hearts now, hm?” he asked softly, and reached into his sash pouch. “I’m a Diviner, too.”

He spread the deck out on top of his chest, showing off the artwork on the face of the cards, and watched Feliciano’s eyes widen.

“You aren’t the first to come fleeing across the sea,” Yao told him, gathering the deck back together in one smooth swipe, and started shuffling. “When I was ten, foreign men came to the orphanage I’d lived in for three years. It was a Diamonds-run orphanage, and they’d always told us that no Diamonds people wanted Hànzú children, except as servants, so we weren’t allowed to be Hànzú. We couldn’t have our names and we couldn’t have our language, but these men-”

He neatened the deck, and set it off to one side.

“I remember the one who asked me my name the best,” he said. “Because when I told him the name the people at the orphanage made me use, he knelt down so he could look me in the eye, and told me that no, he wanted to know my _name._ I almost didn’t tell him, because I’d never seen anyone with purple eyes before.”

“But you told him?” Feliciano asked, voice trembling a little.

“I did,” Yao said. “And I thought the orphanage matron was going to kick me out into the street, and I wouldn’t have even cared because I’d said my _name._ But this man- Timo, he smiled at me, and before the afternoon was over and Berwald had signed on my papers and taken me away.”

“That was nice of them.”

“It was necessary of them,” Yao corrected. “Timo had gotten sick on the voyage over, and was dying of cough. They didn’t have enough money to treat it- or they did, but the money they had was enough for either the adoption fee, or a doctor and treatment that only _might_ have saved him. Timo insisted that they should go with the certainty, because if he died he had to have someone to give his cards to, and he knew it was supposed to be me.”

He reached over to the deck, and flipped over the top card.

“Page of Swords,” Feliciano breathed. “You’re- you’re Diviner of _Spades?_ ”

“Berwald was Queen of Spades,” Yao said. “And the men they traveled with, Matthias and Søren, were Knight and King of Spades. They were the latest in the line of hidden Rulers, waiting to restore the Fourth Kingdom, and Timo had made them come over. He said that they were to be the last Rulers of Spades who were from the old country, Sword stock grown in Sword lands; and that Spades was to be reborn here. The others went, soon after Timo did- Berwald died of grief after Timo was gone; and then Matthias had an accident on the dock. Søren hung on just long enough for me to reach sixteen and my majority, and then went in the night. He left me in charge of his younger brother, Erik- he will be back later, he works at the university. I had gathered my own family by then- Kim Phuong first, the lady with the tea, and then Yong-Soo and Myung-Sun, the twins. What money could be spared from keeping the house up, Erik and I put to buying their papers from their orphanages. Kiku- he is about your age, I think- came later, after I had met and married your sister.”

Feliciano looked down at his lap.

“I’m an orphan too,” he said quietly.

“You are, now,” Yao said. “But you are in good company here, little bird. Tell me- what do you know of a Diviner’s work?”

Feliciano bit his lip.

“ _Mama_ taught me a lot,” he said. “Maybe everything. She knew I was going to be Diviner after her as soon as I was born. She read cards for all of us. But I probably don’t know as much as you.”

 “I am only _old,_ little bird,” Yao told him, tempering his semi-stern tone with a smile, trying to get his little brother-in-law to laugh. “Timo died two days after they took me from the orphanage, and none of the others knew about the cards. I have had to learn everything I could myself. Shall we trade?”

“Trade what?” Feliciano asked, brow crinkled in confusion.

“You tell me what your mother taught you,” Yao said. “About the cards. And from me, you will have a home, and the same education I give my other siblings- a scholar’s education, a secretary’s education. You will learn literature and finance, composition and rhetoric, history, mathematics, the physical sciences, the classical languages-”

“I thought there was only one classical language.”

“That is Old Country thinking,” Yao told him. “Ancient Hearts is not the only classical language. We have our own, here- Hànyŭ and Vāk-Samskrhta. Surinder will teach you Vāk-Samskrhta with its literature as well as the physical sciences, I Hànyŭ and its literature, Erik history and finance; and you can go to the city schools and learn your composition and rhetoric and mathematics and geography and Ancient Hearts and whatever else they decide to inform you of.”

He would, of course, have done all of this for Feliciano anyway- but he knew traumatized children. He and his hadn’t been in the middle of a revolution, but that would have been enough to teach him that people expected something in return for giving something away, and it would be a lesson he was still feeling hard.

As well- they didn’t _know_ each other yet, family though they were. Yao would give Feliciano some concrete reassure to hold on to for a while, until they’d established that familial regard, and the boy could see that that was all the reason Yao needed to add him to his already-full household.

“Thank you,” Feliciano whispered. 

* * *

 

**_The Empress_ **

Propaganda from the new government of Hearts managed to reach even the colonies, and so by the time Feliciano was nineteen and in the university, he’d heard every sort of slander they could come up with about his mother and grandfather.

One, at least, he knew the revolutionaries hadn’t made up- Hearts’ own people had called his mother _‘the Royal Whore’_ , he remembered her saying that. None of his siblings but Vespasiana and Lovino shared a father.

They called _him_ that now- not _‘Royal’_ but _‘Whore’_ , because when he’d turned sixteen and reached majority in legal terms if not in actual reality, he’d abandoned trying to do things the _‘proper’_ way and look for someone he wanted a long-term relationship with before proposing sex.

He was easy to entice to bed, and up for basically everything. Feliciano wasn’t going to deny it. Those first two years, sixteen and seventeen, had been- mmm. He still got hot chills down his spine thinking about it, staying out late with anyone he cared to, coming home in early hours of the morning happily exhausted and sated until the next night. No one would have cared much, if he’d kept it to girls his own age, but why do _that?_ Girls his age, boys his age; young university men hungry for something that wasn’t acceptable in Diamonds families and young women looking for bad-behavior thrill who thought he was cute; older women maybe married maybe not who liked the change and older men who wanted to feel the edge again or were looking for a filthy young thing for the night-

Soon after he’d turned eighteen, though, that had had to change.

He’d been down in the harbor, picking up sailors- there were _always_ sailors who were ready for quick and dirty, and oftentimes there were other men mixed in who wanted to stay anonymous and there could be something extra-enticing there if he was in the mood, but mostly he went to the harbor if he didn’t want to really work at finding his fun- and gotten arrested by the police in the middle of thing with someone he actually knew pretty well, Falko, who usually worked for his brother.

The official charge was _‘prostitution’_ , but Feliciano didn’t buy it, especially after more than hour had gone by and no one had come to confiscate the alleged money he’d been collecting. Feliciano knew a couple of women who _actually_ did this for a living, and they’d told him about how these things went after he’d been mistaken as selling sex by a couple of sailors, early on. The police arrested you, came to confiscate your money- and if you gave them a little something quick, they let you keep most of it, usually, and then let you go.

An officer did eventually come, but it was to fine Falko an absurdly small amount before letting him go. Feliciano tried to get the man to talk to him, but it didn’t work.

In the morning, about eight or nine, Yao showed up. He was in his official Secretariat uniform, and looking stiff and haughty the way he only was when he was being insulted, and he couldn’t do anything about it. He paid the cell warden and then the recording officer for the night shift, and the police let Feliciano go.

They didn’t go home, like Feliciano had expected them to. Yao rushed them to the Secretariat and Feliciano sat awkwardly in the lobby until lunch, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, still dirty from the back-room liaisons and the cell.  

Yao took him home after lunch, and Feliciano felt pretty small when Yao came to get him from his room, where he’d gone to change out of his street clothes into the proper Hànzú robes almost all of them wore around the house, unless company was coming and they had to look Diamonds.

He was taken to the dining room, and bade to take his place at the table. Vespasiana and Surinder were already there, waiting for them.

Feliciano knelt down on the cushion and folded his hands in his lap, the proper way, waiting for his scolding.

“It’s your choice how you want to conduct yourself, Feliciano,” his sister said, which was… not what he’d been expecting. “If you want to sleep around, and do it with whomever you please- fine. We’re Hearts, not Diamonds; and that’s supposed to _mean_ something, no matter what foreign influences crept in with the revolutionaries.”

“It’s not your fault but you can’t do this any longer,” was Surinder’s blunt reply.

Feliciano tilted his head, confused.

“But then why-”

“Because Yao is the only Hànzú to reach a high Secretariat position and there are plenty of people who hate that,” Vespasiana said. “Because we’re foreigners here. Because Diamonds doesn’t like promiscuity and you’re a handsome young foreign man who sleeps around with respectable Diamonds young ladies and consorts with low-class men and is friendly to prostitutes; but no one would care except _Yao_ is in charge of you.”

“They’re trying to humiliate him out of his position with you,” Surinder told him. “Why do you think they only sent a message down after the city was already up to come get you? Why do you think that Yao’s immediate superior in the Secretariat, when he had to beg an extra half-hour to come get you, told him to bring you to work because _‘maybe here he’ll learn something about respectability’_? They _wanted_ everyone to see Yao coming to get you from jail, and you still looking like you’d spent the night fucking in the street because no one had taught you better.”

“We’re not going to tell you to not have sex,” Vespasiana said. “But keep it to people your own age and about your class, and keep the men quiet.”

“That’s not _fair._ ”

“It isn’t,” Yao said. “But the colonies aren’t fair. Diamonds isn’t fair. I have met very few fair people in my life, or at least people who were fair to _me._ ”

“So tone it down,” Surinder told him.

Feliciano might have been Hearts, not Spades- but Surinder was still a Knight, and the Knight’s job was to be the spokesperson for the other Rulers, and he knew Yao loved him too much to order him to stop.

So he bowed, from his sitting position, to his teacher and his older siblings, and then went back to his room.

Kiku had come back later that day, after school was out. Both of them, at eighteen, were out of the city schools; but at that time they had still been waiting on the results of their entrance exams for the university Erik worked at. Feliciano had been using the time as his vacation, but Kiku was tutoring the youngest of the city school students, who’d only had home teaching up until the point they’d been old enough for their parents to enroll them in one of the prestigious with-tuition establishments like the one they’d just graduated from, because he liked being really responsible like that.

“Everyone was talking about you today,” Kiku told him. “And Yao.”

“I bet,” Feliciano said bitterly. “Vespasiana and Surinder had a lot to say about how everyone was trying to shame Yao. That’s what they _wanted_ to happen.”

Kiku was quiet for a moment.

“For what it’s worth,” he told Feliciano. “I’m glad it happened like this.”

Feliciano looked over at him.

“What other way _could_ it have happened?” he asked. “I mean, someone’s parents could get really mad I guess but they’d look kinda silly, just about _everybody_ at the city school is having sex with people they’re not supposed to be-”

“People have been saying you and Yao have been sleeping together.”

_“What?”_ Feliciano demanded, and shot up from where he was lying on his stomach on his bed. “ _Kiku-_ we’re _family!_ He’s my _brother!_ ”

“They’ve said it about you and me, too,” Kiku continued. “And you and Kim Phuong. And you and Yong-Soo and Myung-Sun, usually… together. And you and Surinder, sometimes. Not you and Lovino or Antonio or Cristino-”

Kiku cut himself off, but the pattern was clear. No one would spread rumors about Feliciano having any sex with his _Hearts_ relatives; but the Hànzú ones, or the Samardharaji Surinder, were fair game for slander.

“You never said anything.”

“We didn’t want to worry you,” his brother said.

“Oh, _Kiku,_ ” Feliciano said, getting up to hug him. “Don’t worry about _me._ Nobody should be able to use me to insult you or anybody else!”

“It doesn’t really help when you hug me in public,” Kiku told him; and Feliciano still remembered how he’d sighed, thinking about all the things he’d had to change.

Eighteen hadn’t been his best year. He’d done his best to stick to people his own age. He’d tried to keep Falko too- more secret than the others because older adults _experienced_ adults especially the men _hell yes-_ but they’d almost gotten caught again, and he’d had to stop.

A couple of months after that, he’d found this one man, a fellow student at the university, his age. Arthur was from one of the Diamonds’ minor nobility families, who had a title but no land to go with it. His family, like most of the others in the same situation, had taken up the colonies’ trade.

That had been a little awkward, at first, because Lovino was still _kind of_ trading where and with people he wasn’t authorized too, breaking the strict trade laws; but Arthur hadn’t cared. Arthur was in university studying Hànzú language and literature and history- well, officially he was studying history, because the university didn’t teach Hànzú language or literature but the history department didn’t really care what you focused on _in_ history- because he was the youngest of three elder brothers and a sister, so his parents could afford to pay for him to study something _‘useless’_ like that.

They’d first met because Arthur had been asking around for anyone who knew somebody who could teach him the language, and of course news had come straight to him and Kiku. Both of them had started out teaching Arthur the language, but Kiku didn’t have the interest or talent for it, and Feliciano did.

It also helped that Arthur was so good at separating business from personal. It helped Lovino’s methods of making money be a non-issue between them, and also made for some _really_ nice post-lesson sex, because Feliciano spent the entire time waiting for it.

After one such post-lesson session, when Feliciano was enjoying having a bed to lie in with someone next to him, Arthur rolled over and said, rather hesitantly and embarrassedly:

“So, I know you probably didn’t have the best experience with Hearts’ revolution since your family moved here about when it was going on but we’re trying to have one here for the colonies’ independence and I’m sort of important in it and I wanted to know if you were interested.” 

* * *

 

**_The Devil_ **

The first letter she’d gotten from her father in five years was the one telling her to come home, as soon as possible. Adalheidis did her best to obey her father, but Gilbert was still working on the Knight’s staff, and had to get permission from the King of Clubs to leave his job to come home with her; and even once he had permission they had to find someone to replace him-

That was more complicated than anyone had expected, because Gilbert ended up making an off-handed comment about the undersecretary Knight Roderich wanted to promote to Gilbert’s job, about how Toris _always_ called it beforehand when something big was about to happen, and Toris got sent up to see the King and came out of that meeting as Diviner of Clubs.

It was an important event, at least, and gave her something big to report to her father when she got home.

Thiudericks ended up not caring.

“So they managed to fill out all of their positions,” he said when she told him, dismissing the entire event out of hand. “Has all your time at their court made you forget the entire system is founded on superstition and the fear of the common people?”

“No, father,” she told him, and looked down at her shoes. Behind her, she felt Gilbert go tense with anger. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Good,” her father said. “Because there’s a rebellion brewing against Diamonds in the colonies, and I want you to go over there and give them our political support. Advise them. If the ruling family of Diamonds can’t control their own colonies, then their heartland here will be ripe for rebellion, and then there will only be Clubs.”

Adalheidis had to excuse them quickly, before Gilbert tried to defend his country’s political system to her father.

“Adalheidis,” Thiudericks called, when she was just over the threshold of the door. “I forgot to say- you’re going to be taking Ludwig with you.”

She hustled Gilbert out of the house to their room in the nearest hotel, so he could use the privacy of their room to vent his anger. When the time for dinner came, he told her he wasn’t going to go back. He’d go out and see the city.

Privately- she’d never say anything to her husband or to her father- Adalheidis was relieved that Gilbert didn’t want to spend any more time in her family’s house. She’d been dreading trying to mediate between her brothers’ and father’s political ideals and her husband’s faith in the system they’d overthrown.

That night at dinner was the first time she’d seen Ludwig since he’d been a weedy little teenager, the youngest of all the Beilschmidt siblings. He was- nineteen? Twenty? She couldn’t remember, but he was an adult now, and he looked more like it. Her youngest brother was clearly at the tail end of an awkward growth spurt that had added a lot of height and breadth to his frame, but he looked strong and leader-like. He’d make a good show, up at a podium or in front of the Senate or on a stage, giving speeches.

If only, she learned over the course of the dinner, he wasn’t so _quiet._

Adalheidis spent most of her time over the next couple of days at the house, and not the hotel, making sure Ludwig was properly packed up and getting more information and orders from her father and her brothers. Ludwig gave monosyllabic, mumbled answers to just about everything, and after a bit she gave up on trying to talk to him. He’d been shy when he was younger, but they’d all been expecting him to grow out of it.

Apparently not.

She, Gilbert, and Ludwig got on a ship to the colonies five days after she and Gilbert had arrived from Clubs. Adalheidis had been expecting to take the travel time to rest and recover from the breakneck pace of travel they’d been setting, but Gilbert came to see her a couple of hours after they’d left port.

“This mission isn’t your father forgiving you for marrying a filthy monarchist,” he said.

Adalheidis had been trying to pretend she hadn’t been thinking- hoping- that that was what the letter had meant ever since it arrived.

Gilbert sat down on the bed with her in the passenger cabin they’d been given. It was the nicest one on the whole ship.

“I talked to a lot of people while you were packing to go again,” he continued. “City people. Shopkeepers. Laborers on break. University students in the cafés. There’s a counter-revolution brewing. They feel like your father’s revolution betrayed them. They feel like Hearts’ government has been making mistake after mistake, ever since they got into power. They loved the Knight of Hearts, and are still angry she got killed storming the palace- I kept hearing _‘If only Knight Santiana had lived’_. And they were happy when King Marcus got executed. But they were saying that everything started going downhill when they hung Diviner Renata from the balcony. She didn’t do anything wrong- and it’s not only the old people who are saying that the Diviner is the foundation of a country.”

“But they _can’t_ counter-rebel,” Adalheidis told him. “There aren’t- well, there _are_ Vargases left, but it’s just the middle two, and everyone knows their mother passed them over for any Ruler positions. It was Feliciano who was going to be Diviner after her, and no one heard anything about the baby, but they’re the only ones who could have taken anything. They’re dead.”

“They’re _missing,_ ” Gilbert corrected. “Nobody can prove they ever saw the bodies.”

“Father says-”

“Your father can’t _prove_ it, Heidi,” he cut her off. “He’s never said anything about where the bodies are, so anyone could check. And the Royal effects were never found.”

“They were destroyed,” Adalheidis told him, repeating what she’d always been told. “In the looting. Not out in public, before you can ask, because someone might have tried something.”

Gilbert shrugged.

“There are rumors,” he said. “That Feliciano Vargas has been seen around the capital of Hearts, speaking against the government and denouncing your family in particular.”

Adalheidis tried to put it out of her mind for the rest of the voyage, which worked out surprisingly well, because it turned out that Ludwig _wasn’t_ shy.

He was only quiet at home, where his father and brothers were around to hear him. He took an almost immediate liking to Gilbert, who was always ready to tell outlandish stories about his life and the rebellion in Clubs that had gotten rid of the old King that Adalheidis never knew how much to trust. Ludwig drunk them up as fast as Gilbert could think of new stories to tell, and went around talking to all the crew and learning about their jobs and want the different parts of the ship did and what the winds and seas were like at all times of the year and how you knew the best times to trade and who had the best goods and how you judged that and the exchange rates for coinage and interesting facts about marine life and-

“I like the kid,” Gilbert confided to her, a week out from the colonial capital. “I’m glad your father thought he was sufficiently useless to ship off for a while when it looked like things were about to get heated at home.” 

* * *

 

**_Justice_ **

Alfred was a gunsmith’s apprentice by day and a revolutionary leader by night.

He wasn’t the _only_ leader, or even necessarily the most important one; but he was the one the most people knew, because he was good at giving speeches. He was also really good at running away from police, which was a secondary skill the other speechifying revolutionaries hadn’t managed to perfect in time to avoid getting arrested and shipped to the overseas capital for judging.

He got along okay with the other big revolutionaries, though sometimes it grated on him that they looked down at him, a little, because there was a seven-year difference between him the next-youngest one of their number.

Thankfully, there was Arthur. He wasn’t one for getting out on the front lines, but he was great at organizing and money because of his family training. Sometimes Alfred wanted to take him along to the underground meetings and the _‘secret’_ public speeches, because he such a cool and collected person, but Arthur always refused.

Estelle, though, he could always count on her to come along and help rile up the crowd, and get them away from the police afterwards. She was a dressmaker’s apprentice, small for her age, but she had a voice and a pair of legs on her, which was Alfred needed.

She was also good at being overlooked, even though everyone always noticed her. She had the dark skin of the far southern regions of the continent, where the colonies hadn’t managed to spread, but she’d grown up here and the Diamonds people were used to ignoring anyone who didn’t look like them, after the initial acknowledgement of the presence of a lesser person in their midst.

Being overlooked was a useful skill for a revolutionary.

Anyway, she was the only one who could even sometimes beat Feliciano at cards.

Personally, Alfred was a little ambivalent about Arthur’s language tutor and regular casual fuck, but Feli was really, _really_ good at cards, and Alfred was going to keep playing him in the late nights, after the meetings and the speeches, until he was winning regularly.

More importantly for everyone else, Feliciano had connections- or at least Arthur _claimed_ that Feliciano had connections.

“He’s Yao Wang’s brother,” he kept telling Alfred. “I know that doesn’t mean anything to _you,_ but Scholar Wang is actually the sort of man we want on our side! He very nearly runs an entire branch of the Secretariat, and he’s Hànzú! The others are always complaining how they can’t get the Hànzú to trust us- they trust _him._ If we could get Scholar Wang to endorse us-”

“Yeah, okay,” Alfred said. “You keep telling me, but it’ll take more than that. Ace of Spades!”

He slapped the card down on the table triumphantly.

_“Every time,”_ Arthur grumbled.

Alfred grinned at him.

“It’s my lucky card, Art- c’mon, you know that!”

“Yes,” Arthur grumbled. “Because you _insist_ on saying that _every time_ you play it.”

Next to him, Feliciano just smiled and laid down a five-card run, which won him the game.

Alfred huffed and fake-glared at him, gathering the cards up to deal a new hand to start again.

“You’re going to tell me how you do that one day.”

Feliciano just smiled.

“Cards like me,” he said.

“That sounds like code for _‘I’m a dirty cheater’_ ,” Estelle half-accused.

“No cheating!” Feliciano protested, still smiling, and held his empty hands up. “You don’t even have to deal me in this time!”

“Oh no, you’re going to take some cards and you’re going to like it. _I’m_ winning this one.”

“In your _dreams,_ Al,” Estelle told him. “This one’s _mine._ ”

They passed a few rounds by watching Feliciano suspiciously. He obviously wasn’t trying very hard to win.

“You’re right,” Feliciano said abruptly, at the beginning of the seventh round. “You won’t get the total support of the Hànzú on Yao’s word alone. But Yao can get you most of them. They respect him, and trust his judgement. And if _Yao_ speaks for you, Surinder will do the same about you to the Samardharaji in the colonies. And if they both agree about you-”

He shrugged.

“I’ll talk to the immigrants. They don’t all respect me, but they know me. They’ll listen if I talk.”

“Wait,” Alfred said, so shocked that he forgot to keep his hand hidden. Even if not _all_ of them joined up- the majority of the Hànzú, the Samardharaji, and the non-Diamonds immigrants and colonists was _more_ than enough to outnumber the Diamonds colonists. _“What?”_

 Arthur and Estelle had stopped to, to stare at Feliciano. Evidently, Arthur hadn’t realized _just_ how connected his friend was.

“Just,” Feliciano said, looking suddenly nervous. “You’re- _why_ exactly do you want Diamonds out?”

“Because they’re super-controlling?” Alfred said. He’d given enough speeches on this- shouldn’t Feliciano had heard about this already? The revolutionaries weren’t a _small_ group, just not quite big enough to be able to ignore the governments’ constant efforts to suppress them. “Especially with trade and money. They’re pretty awful at social stuff, too. Diamonds is all about money, and money means power; but having power doesn’t mean you get to use it to hurt people. You’re supposed to _help._ ”

“Feli,” Arthur said. “We’re not the Beilschmidts.”

“You’re _Hearts?_ ” Estelle asked Feliciano.

“Yeah, of course,” Feliciano said, looking a little confused.

“Huh,” Alfred said. “I never would have guessed. Arthur is Diamonds, so I just thought- I mean, I know _‘Feliciano Carreido’_ isn’t a Diamonds name, but there’s always bleeding over the borders.”

Feliciano shook his head a little, and Alfred got the feeling that it was the equivalent of an eye-roll.

“I’ll bring Yao tomorrow night,” he said. “He likes cards, too.”

Alfred, Arthur, and Estelle talked late that night, after Feliciano had left. The possibility of finally gaining a majority of the population, and with the groups they hadn’t really been able to attract large numbers from yet, was really big. It was big enough that the other revolutionary leaders should probably know about it- but none of them wanted to half-make that promise and then fail to deliver.

They were all a little nervous when Wang Yao showed up the next night.

“I brought my own deck,” he said, when Estelle pulled their usual one out.

Estelle narrowed her eyes at him, and then looked over at Feliciano.

“Does _he_ cheat, too?” she demanded.

Yao looked over at him, too.

“You _cheat_ at cards?” he asked disapprovingly.

“I do _not,_ ” Feliciano insisted. “She’s just jealous I almost always win!”

“Well,” Yao said. “In the interests of fairness- why don’t _you_ deal the first round, Mr. Jones?”

He passed the deck over to Alfred, and he dealt everyone the two cards of the first round, more focused on trying to figure out how to bring up politics with the man than the game itself.

“Hey!” Arthur exclaimed indignantly when he looked at his cards. Alfred picked up his own hand, and had to agree. One of them was a King, but of some suit he’d never seen before- Swords, it looked like. The other card didn’t even _have_ a suit. It was more like a miniature painting, with the detail and quality of the paints that had been used, still clear and bright despite how old the cards clearly were.

The weird card had something written under it that he had squint to read, because he’d never really learned Ancient Hearts.

“ _‘Temperance’_?” he guessed.

Estelle made a noise of disgust, and threw her cards down. She had the Jack of some suit represented by little gold circles, and an art card labeled _‘The High Priestess’_.

Arthur put his own cards down on the table a moment later- Queen of Swords and _‘Judgement’_ \- and very carefully pushed them away.

“These aren’t playing cards,” he said, watching Yao and Feliciano warily.

Feliciano flashed the table a smile, and showed off his cards- Jack of Cups, and a card showing the star-studded night sky.

“Hm,” Yao said, looking at Alfred, Arthur, and Estelle’s cards. Alfred got a look at his hand- Jack of Swords and a card showing the sun in a bright blue summer sky. “Interesting.”

He gathered up everyone’s cards and placed them in the middle of the table, not shuffling them back into the deck, and dealt everyone new cards.

Alfred, Arthur, and Estelle eyed each other, and then looked at their hands at same time.

They all came up exactly identical to the last.

“Bloody impossible,” Arthur muttered under his breath, and reached for the cards in the middle of the table. They’d turned into the rest of the Rulers cards.

“Uh….” was all Alfred could manage to think.

“Why?” Arthur demanded. “Why do you have Diviner’s cards, Scholar Wang?”

“Because I’m the Diviner of Spades,” he said.

“You’re not _Spades!_ ”

Yao raised an eyebrow at him, and Alfred winced a little in sympathy at the judgement there.

“I’m not _old_ Spades,” the man said. “I’m not Swords blood. But _new_ Spades is meant to rise in the colonies, here. The Diviner of Spades before me dragged his Ruling Family here from Diamonds, where they’d fled to from Clubs, because the cards told him that the first Ruling Family of new Spades would be found here. He found me, and I have been on the lookout for the rest of my Family since then.”

“He found Surinder a long time ago,” Feliciano told them eagerly. “He’s Knight! And now he’s found _you!_ King and Queen! That’s the full Family- it’s time! The Sun is all about success and happiness!”

“Swords,” Estelle said, looking around at everyone’s hands again. “Spades? So what’s these gold circles?”

“Medallions,” Feliciano said. “Diamonds.”

Her nose wrinkled up in disgust.

“ _I’m_ not Diamonds,” she said. “I’m from _here-_ I’m a colonial!”

“Pages,” Feliciano said. “Jacks to everyone else, that’s Diviner. The cards say you’re Diviner of Diamonds.”

“Diamonds _has_ a Diviner already,” Alfred said.

“Basch is a _false_ Diviner,” Feliciano sniffed. “He always has been. He’s supposed to be Knight, but the others are too stubborn to even admit that they’re supposed to _have_ that position.”

“And how are _you_ so knowledgeable?” Arthur demanded. “Your brother-”

“Arthur,” Estelle cut him off. “Feli’s got a Jack- a Page- too.”

“Hearts,” Alfred said quietly. “You’re Diviner of Hearts.”

Feliciano smiled again. It was slyer than any of them had seen before.

“Carreido is Antonio’s- my brother’s husband’s- surname,” he said. “Lovino and Vespasiana and Cristino and I, we’re what’s left of the Vargases.”

“Well shit,” Arthur said after a couple of seconds. “ _That’s_ what you meant all those times when you said that cards like you. But it’s _still_ cheating.”

* * *

 

**_Strength_ **

Gilbert loved his wife, and he’d come to be pretty fond of her kid brother- but there was still a bit of satisfaction to seeing the colonial revolutionaries metaphorically slam the door in Adalheidis’s face.

“I don’t think you understand, Lady _Beilschmidt,_ ” the revolutionary who’d been dispatched to deal with them said. “We’re not revolting against Diamonds on behalf of their political structure. We hate their political choices. We stand behind the Ruling Family of Spades.”

“You _found_ them?” his wife asked, astonished. If Gilbert was being honest with himself, he was pretty surprised to hear that, too. “They _exist-_ well that still works then, my father has always been a Spades nationalist-”

“The King of Spades is a colonial-born gunsmith’s apprentice,” the revolutionary cut her off. “Maybe there’s old Spades blood in the family somewhere, but there’s no way to know for sure. Our Queen is merchant Diamonds nobility, and he can legitimately claim a bit of old Spades; but he’s hardly your father’s sort of Spades. Our Knight is a Samardharaji engineer and our Diviner is Hànzú, self-taught in their Classical Scholars’ tradition _and_ with a modern secretary’s training. He was highly placed in the Secretariat until the Family went public. Would your father support _this_ Spades?”

Adalheidis didn’t even have to say _‘no’_. They all knew the answer.

“May I at least meet them?” she asked. “I’d like to congratulate them.”

The revolutionary looked her up and down derisively.

“I think they could live without the Beilschmidts’ _‘congratulations’_ ,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be from the Beilschmidts,” Adalheidis told him. “I was Ambassador to Clubs for seven years. My husband was the Knight of Clubs’ right-hand man up until he left the service to accompany me here. I care for the Four Kingdoms more than my father.”

Gilbert shot the revolutionary his best feral smile, the one he’d reserved for young, arrogant Duma lords.

“Got some information I bet your Diviner would be interested to hear, too,” he said.

The revolutionary huffed, and frowned, and grumbled, but eventually took them further into the revolution’s headquarters, to a guarded room.

Gilbert casually leaned against the wall while their revolutionary debated quietly with the guards.

_‘-keep getting the same cards,’_ he could hear someone saying on the other side of the wall. _‘It’s been Strength, the Stars, and the Chariot for **weeks,** Yao. I’ve got the Stars and I’ve got the Chariot pinned down, but Strength? I’ve **had** patience, almost eight years of it. I guess I could have to be more courageous, but I keep feeling like it’s supposed to mean compassion, here-’_

The debate finished, and the revolutionary shooed him off the wall to straighten himself up to enter the presence of the Ruling Family.

“Lady Adalheidis Beilschmidt, Representative from the Government of Hearts,” their revolutionary announced disgruntledly, opening the door. “And her husband Gilbert Beilschmidt.”

Gilbert had plenty of titles that the man could have added on, but he didn’t press it right now. People didn’t like Adalheidis’s family here, and he was going to keep an eye out.

It proved to be a good idea. The King of Spades, some kid, introduced himself warmly to Adalheidis. Some other kid who was probably his Queen was shadowing him, and their Knight had his hand hovering near his sword over off to the side, but their Diviner-

There were three people sitting around a table by the wall, who’d been holding the conversation he’d eavesdropped on. One of them was a mature man, a Hànzú, so that must have been Spades’ Diviner.

With him at the table were yet _more_ kids; one dark girl with her hair tied in two parts with red ribbon, and a young man who was glaring at him with a familiar bitter fury. That was someone spoiling for a fight.

“You got a problem?” Gilbert asked, interrupting whatever his wife and the King of Spades had been saying to each other. He started walking over to the table, and the young man’s glare ratcheted up, gaining a new level of venom.

He stood from his chair, hands fisting on top of the table.

“I _do,_ ” he hissed, and then spat at Gilbert’s feet. _“Beilschmidt.”_

“Hey now,” Gilbert told him warningly. “That’s my wife’s family you’re talking about there. I can agree that they’re a pack of usurping assholes, but _she’s_ okay.”

“Thank you, dear,” he heard Adalheidis say behind him, voice laden with sarcasm.

The man’s eyes shifted from him to her.

“Your father is a _murderer,_ ” he accused.

Gilbert heard the Diviner of Spades make a soft little sound. He picked up a card from the table- a lion- and held it up so the younger man could see.

“ _Compassion,_ Feliciano,” he said. “Listen to your cards.”

“Woah, hold it,” Gilbert said. “Feliciano _Vargas?_ ”

The returning glare was enough of an answer, as the Diviner of Hearts visibly bit down on his fury.

“You know, rumor has it you’re in the capital right now, defaming Theudericks Beilschmidt and inciting the populace to treason, sedition, and riot.”

“I’m what?” Feliciano asked, surprised out of his anger.

“There’s a whole counter-revolution brewing,” Gilbert told him. “I saw it when we got into the capital.”

Feliciano eyed him suspiciously.

“Beilschmidts _left_ the capital?”

“Hey, I _told_ you,” Gilbert said. “The Beilschmidts are my wife’s family. I’m from the Clubs’ New Territories. Adalheidis’s father sent her out as ambassador to King Ivan’s court, I was second under Knight Roderich-”

He shrugged. The others could infer the rest of the story.

“I’ve got nothing against your family, is what I’m saying.”

There was a tense silence in the room for a few moments.

“A counter-revolution?” Feliciano eventually asked, sounding grudging about it.

“Little one,” Gilbert told him, holding up his thumb and forefinger in indication. “Getting bigger. Be big if you went over there.”

“I can’t,” Feliciano said. “It’s still just me. I haven’t found my Family yet.”

Gilbert shrugged again.

“They’ll come,” he told the Diviner philosophically. “Had to wait on them some in Clubs, too. Anyway, in the meantime- there’s a Family right here to establish in power, right?” 

* * *

 

**_The Fool_ **

They sent Estelle off to the capital of Diamonds on the first diplomatic mission between it and the new Spades.

Feliciano wasn’t sad, to see her go, exactly. He missed her a little, and it felt sort of funny to only have two Diviners around instead of three, but she couldn’t avoid going any longer.

But now it was just him. Spades was established again. Clubs and Diamonds had found their Diviners, and pretty soon all three kingdoms were going to have all four of their Rulers in place, for the first time in centuries.

That left only Hearts.

He’d been _waiting._ He’d been _looking._ He knew exactly what sort of trouble would happen if he tried to go back to Hearts without his full Family- the counter-revolution might win, but soon enough they’d be chased out in another upheaval of power as everything shifted, unstable without the anchors of all four Rulers.

The Four Kingdoms were _so close_ to all being complete.

_He_ just wasn’t-

Feliciano had been reading his cards. He’d even asked Yao and Estelle to check theirs. No matter which of them asked about the rest of Hearts’ Ruling Family, they turned up the same cards- The Moon, The Tower, The Emperor, The Magician.

Anxiety and insecurity. Disaster and upheaval. Authority and a solid foundation. Power and action.

The Emperor and The Magician were clear enough. Find the rest of the Family, the foundation of Hearts, and they would be able to act.

But The Moon and the Tower- it was foreboding, and worrying, and right at this moment, Feliciano was cursing himself for not paying better _attention._

The Moon and the Tower were sitting out on the table in front of him.

Illusions and the subconscious. Sudden change and revelations.

He’d been so _stupid._ So _blind._

The cards were telling them that the people he’d been looking for were already right under his nose.

He shuffled his deck back together and then went around to ask the household to gather together. He got all of them in the living area- Antonio, Lovino, Vespasiana, and Cristino; Kim Phuong and Yong-Soo and Myung-Sun and Kiku; and Adalheidis and Gilbert and Ludwig, none of whom had gone back to Hearts yet. Somewhere along the line, in the Spades uprising, they’d committed to _him._

It was still so strange.

“You know the idea,” he told them. “Two cards apiece.”  

The deck got passed around the room, and when it got back to him, Feliciano clutched the too-thin stack of cards tightly. Who-

He took a deep breath.

“All right,” he said. “Everybody look.”

Lovino, Vespasiana, and Cristino didn’t look too worked up about their cards, and Feliciano didn’t know if that was supposed to make him feel better or not. On one hand, they had their own lives already- but on the other hand, they were the rest of Vargas.

Feliciano didn’t really want to be alone in this.

He heard Gilbert whistle- a rare sound, something he did when he was legitimately impressed. Feliciano, and most of the rest of the room, looked over at him.

Gilbert flipped his cards around for Feliciano to see.

The Lovers and the Knight of Cups.

“Don’t need to tell _me_ what this means,” he said. “I learned enough working under Roderich. He’s going to _shit_ himself when he hears about this.”

_“Gilbert,”_ his wife told him reprovingly.

“Feliciano,” Kiku said, very quietly. “I-”

Gently, Feliciano reached over and tipped his brother’s cards down.

Judgement and the Queen of Cups.

“Yao’s going to be so proud of you, Kiku,” Feliciano told him softly. “And _I’m_ glad you’ll be coming with me.”

“I-” Kiku started to say. “This- Well. We should- I should start- packing. There’s-”

Feliciano smiled at him, and let their other siblings crowd around him and chatter, letting him sit quietly without pressure to talk while he gathered himself.

“ _Someone_ has Temperance,” he said, looking around the rest of the room. “And-”

“King,” Ludwig wheezed. He was staring down at his cards, expression white and strained. “King of Cups. King of Hearts.”

* * *

 

**_The Hierophant_ **

Ludwig hadn’t wanted to believe the cards. He was Feliciano and Kiku’s age, and while he could vaguely remember living in a time before his father had been in charge of Hearts, he didn’t have any concrete positive memories of what living under a Ruling Family had been like.

He still didn’t know, really. He and Adalheidis and Gilbert had spent three months technically under the rule of Spades, but it wasn’t like they’d been in a _typical_ situation. They were guests of the Diviner and the Knight, not just living out in the town somewhere as part of the populace.

But- if it was Gilbert, and Kiku, and Feliciano-

Maybe it really _wouldn’t_ be a horrible thing.

They’d gotten on the flagship of Lovino Vargas’s merchant fleet. It was the same ship that had brought Feliciano over to the colonies when they’d fled Hearts, and the Vargases had felt like that was a statement that needed to be made, even if they were the only ones who’d understand it.

That voyage had been Feliciano and Lovino and Antonio, Kiku, Gilbert and Adalheidis, and himself.

He’d spent the entire time sick. For the first couple of days, he’d been able to pass it off as sea-sickness; but after that he’d had to admit that the reason he couldn’t stop being nauseous, and couldn’t sleep, and kept vomiting up anything he put in his stomach, was because he was so _scared_ to go back.

It wasn’t so much the revolution that was to come. He’d seen some of that, in Spades; and he’d grown up on the stories of the one in Hearts.

It was his father.

“I can’t talk to him,” he’d gasped to Feliciano, a few nights out from docking in Hearts, hyperventilating and on the verge of hysterical tears. “I can’t I can’t I can’t-”

Feliciano had gathered him up in his arms and held him tightly, resting his cheek on the top of Ludwig’s hair.

“You don’t have to, sweetheart,” his Diviner told him, rocking him a little. The bed shifted under new weight as Kiku sat down on the mattress near their feet, and their Queen laid a hand on Ludwig’s knee, offering silent comfort.

“I’m _King._ ”

“And your job is to talk to outsiders,” Feliciano said. “Your father is a citizen of Hearts, which makes it an internal matter; so it’s Gilbert’s job. The Knight speaks for the Family to the politicians and the civic leaders.”

They hadn’t sent word ahead of their arrival, so they’d docked uneventfully in the harbor.

Things hadn’t stayed uneventful for long. A blonde, strikingly feminine man Ludwig had never seen before slipped in beside Gilbert in their party as they left the dock area.

“So, like,” the stranger said. “Toris sent me? He said you’d gotten yourself in _totally_ deep with some like, super-important destiny revolution sort of thingy? So he asked me to come and make sure you don’t fuck up your shit.”

Gilbert had grinned at him, and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Remind me to tell Toris he’s _seriously_ awesome, Feliks,” he told the man; and Feliks grinned back and led them to the revolution.

They’d hid out with the revolutionaries for a few days, while word spread of their presence. Feliciano was out all hours, all over the city, proving his Vargas blood and Diviner’s authority with the cards, winning over the fence-sitters and the majority support the revolution had been waiting for.

On their fifth day back in the city, Gilbert put on his sword and went to crash the Senate. They heard, later, about how he’d stepped up to the floor and confronted Thiudericks directly.

Ludwig hadn’t wanted to hear it- Gilbert had gotten out safe, and that was all he needed to know, so he’d tuned the story out. Feliciano let him hold a hand, and bumped their shoulders together so they were pressed side-to-side to provide more support.

Hearts proved to be a faster revolution than Spades. The city rose with Gilbert and Feliciano at their head. Gilbert took the fight to the government and his father-in-law, while Feliciano returned in victory to his childhood home. A Vargas once more walked the halls of the Palace of Hearts.

Ludwig was back at headquarters, hunched over a porcelain bowl, Kiku kneeling on the floor next to him and rubbing his back. He only left when Gilbert returned, with the surviving leaders of the previous revolution, to face the Queen’s Judgement.

_I can’t do this job,_ Ludwig told himself, as Kiku stood, picked up his staff, and went out to tell the revolution that Ludwig’s father had to die.

They all moved into the palace late that night. Feliciano led them to the right suites of rooms, but then didn’t bother to go back to his once he’d shown Ludwig to the King’s suite. He just flopped down in bed right next to him, and fell asleep together.

Ludwig woke up with Feliciano’s hand petting his hair. He refused to open his eyes, just feeling the slow, gentle strokes and the morning sun.

“I can’t do this,” he told Feliciano. “I can’t be King.”

“Do you know what the last lesson on being Diviner my mother gave me was?” Feliciano asked.

“No.”

“It was about the place of all four Rulers. The King is Temperance. You balance everyone else- my word as Diviner, Kiku’s Judgements as Queen, and Gilbert’s diplomacy as Knight. You tie us all together, and you tie the country together. You are the symbol. The figurehead.”

Ludwig opened his eyes.

“I don’t know how to do that,” he said.

Feliciano smiled at him, the expression lopsided.

“It’s the easiest of all the jobs,” his Diviner told him. “Honest. You’ll do fine.”

“But if I don’t-”

“All Four Kingdoms have all their Four Rulers again, Ludwig,” Feliciano said. “They’re all in balance. We can handle anything the world has to throw at us- together, like we were meant to.”


End file.
